Exploring Human Values: Human Being Between Animal and Machine

Saturday 30 June 2018, 10.00AM to 4.30pm

Human beings have been conceptualised as a combination of angel and animal, immortal soul and material body, since long before René Descartes’ famous dualism. More recently, philosophers such as Kelly Oliver have asked whether deterministic conceptions of humanity - genetic, psychic, and social - reveal the machine in the ghost, echoing Descartes’ mechanical theory of non-human animal life. This course will explore the relations between humans and animals and humans and machines, with the aim of isolating what it means to be human.